by Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have, for the first time ever, mapped the plasma “bubbles” of a supermassive black hole-powered quasar that lives relatively close to Earth.
Although supermassive black holes millions or billions of times larger than the sun are thought to lie at the center of all galaxies, not all of these cosmic titans are powerhouse quasars. Some, like the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A*, are relatively quiet because they are not feeding heavily on the material around them.
This particular quasar powered by the ravenous supermassive black hole is located in the active core of the Zwicky 1 galaxy, about 847 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Pisces. Although this is an extremely wide distance, most quasars exist early in the universe, meaning they can be billions of light years away.
Therefore, because this quasar, named “I Zwicky 1”, is an excellent laboratory to study the extreme conditions of active galactic nuclei (AGN), regions as bright as possible combined light represent all the stars in the surrounding galaxies. with them. That includes “burps” or outflows of matter from the supermassive black hole’s surroundings.
The supermassive black hole at the heart of Zwicky 1 is estimated to have a mass equal to 9.3 million suns. It is thought to consume matter at an incredible rate and produce powerful jets that drive high-speed “burps”. A team of astronomers from the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON) described these outflows for the first time.
“I Zwicky 1 is very special in its properties,” team leader Anna Juráňová said in a statement. “Other quasars have similar outflows, but in this one, everything is just right. Our viewing angle, the width of the lines in the spectrum, and so on. This allows us to dig much deeper into their processes. We created a global dome. picture of the movements of ionized gas in a quasar.”
How quasars get their outflows
Like all black holes, supermassive black holes are surrounded by an outer boundary called the exit horizon. This is the point at which the gravitational influence of a black hole has become so intense that even light is not fast enough to meet its escape velocity.
Because nothing with mass can travel faster than the speed of light, it may surprise you how these quasars escape. The answer is that the material comprising the outflows never exceeds the event horizon.
When a supermassive black hole is surrounded by matter, whether it’s gas and dust or the remnants of a star whose center of gravity the black hole has sheared off, that matter has angular momentum. That means it cannot fall directly to the black hole and instead forms a flat spinning cloud around the black hole called an “accretion disk.”
Material in the accretion disk is gradually fed to the central supermassive black hole, but if there’s one thing scientists know about black holes, it’s that they eat messy. Not all content in accredited discs is destined to fall into the black hole; some charged particles are sent to its poles by powerful magnetic fields.
These magnetic fields accelerate the trapped particles to speeds that are a significant fraction of the speed of light, and then explode as high impact jets. These jets and their associated radiation push clouds of material out of the supermassive black hole, and these are the outflows that the team mapped for I Zwicky 1.
Using Hubble, Juráňová and his colleagues discovered the properties of four different plasma outflows from around I Zwicky 1. They found that they were moving at speeds between 134,000 mph (217,000 kph), 200 times the speed of sound, and a whopping 6.5 million mph. (10.5 million kph), which is about 8,500 times the speed of sound and about 1% of the speed of light.
The team also discovered that one of the outflows appears to be “caught in the shadow” of another black hole burp. This happens as radiation from the accretion disk in the form of ultraviolet light is absorbed by elements such as nitrogen, oxygen and carbon in the clouds of material near the black hole and is pushed away as a result.
Not only is this the first time astronomers have seen this mechanism in action, but it shows the researchers that the immediate environment of Zwicky 1 is more active than the homes of other quasar AGNs.
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“Our data indicate that much more gas is being lifted and blown out of the disk around the black hole,” concluded Juráňová. “This is the closest we’ve come to getting this insight into how these supermassive black holes grow and interact with their environment.”
The team’s research was published online on Tuesday (June 11) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
